Glen Roy

Undiscovered Scotland: The Ultimate Online Guide

Looking North
Along Glen Roy: The "Parallel Roads" Can Clearly Be Seen

A narrow single-track road turns
north off the A86 in Roybridge and runs
past St Margaret's Church and Manse. The road runs for nearly ten miles along
Glen Roy before coming to an end in the midst of some impressive mountain
scenery.

Crofts in Glen Roy

Battle of Mulroy
Memorial

En route it climbs steeply past a parking area on the flank of
Beinn a Mhonicag. The views north from here take in a considerable length of
the glen and make this the best place from which to appreciate the most
spectacular example of a landscape formed in the last ice age to be found
anywhere in Britain.

The Parallel
Roads

The key are the "parallel roads". These perfectly parallel "tracks"
run along both sides of the glen at heights of 260m, 325m and 350m. Long held
in folklore to be hunting paths used by the Celtic warrior Fingal, they could
equally be mistaken by modern eyes for forestry tracks.

They are actually lines left by the shoreline of a vast loch that
filled Glen Roy some 10,000 years ago, held in place by a dam of ice formed by
the head of a glacier that advanced from the south west.

As the glacier advanced, so the water it trapped in the glen
deepened in stages, cutting shoreline ledges through wave action at each stage.
When the glacier eventually retreated the water drained away, leaving the
landscape you see today.

The scale of the changes wrought by the ice age is brought home
when you realise that the upper lines are much higher than the parking area you
are standing in: the glacier would have had to fill all of the lower land to
the south and west of where you are standing.

Glen Roy has one more claim to fame. A stone cairn half a mile
north of Roybridge remembers the nearby
site of the Battle of Mulroy. This took place on 4 August 1688 and was the last
inter-clan battle fought in Scotland. The memorial notes that the MacDonells of
Keppoch defeated the Mackintoshes.